The South Dakota Supreme Court has upheld the 200-year sentence of Paul Dean Jensen. The prison inmate was 14 when he murdered Michael Hare in Fort Pierre 20 years ago.

Jensen was sentenced to life without possibility of parole, the only penalty available to him at the time. After the U.S. Supreme Court found mandatory life sentences for juvenile murderers to be unconstitutional, Jensen came up for a new sentence hearing in June last year.

SDPB's Victoria Wicks reports this latest development in an ongoing story.

Earth Day activities this weekend in Rapid City will include a March for Science. A junior at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology is organizing a march on Saturday from the campus to the Central States Fairgrounds. Cole Sawyer says this is a nonpartisan and diverse group coming together to emphasize the importance of evidence-based research.

Marchers will gather at the Surbeck Center parking lot Saturday morning at 9 a.m. The march ends north of the 4-H building at the Central States Fairgrounds.

The South Dakota Supreme Court has reversed the DUI conviction of a Brookings man. Steven Stanage was arrested in October 2014 after driving up to a fast-food pick-up window. He was convicted of first-time DUI, but the magistrate stayed sentencing pending the outcome of the appeal. The state Supreme Court heard oral arguments in October last year. The court's majority finds that the arresting officer did not have sufficient cause to stop Stanage's vehicle. SDPB's Victoria Wicks has this report.

A Rapid City artist whose paintings are based on his own collages is displaying his work at the Dahl Arts Center. The exhibit, Occasional Void, opened this weekend. Luke Gorder's paintings mix incongruous images for an often surreal result. SDPB's Victoria Wicks has this story.

The exhibit Occasional Void is at the Dahl Arts Center until June 24. Also showing is Comic Spirit, artwork with humor as a theme, compiled from the works of various Native artists from the 1970s to now.

The South Dakota Supreme Court has upheld the 92-year sentence of Daniel Charles, who murdered his stepfather in 1999. Charles was 14 at the time. He had been sentenced to life without parole, but was given a second chance resulting from a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2012.

Charles appealed that second-chance sentence, saying it was too harsh given his youthful immaturity at the time of the crime.

The state high court rejected that argument. SDPB's Victoria Wicks reports.

The history of birth control and abortion is a long one. In the United States, abortion and contraception were legal from Colonial times until the late 1800s. Then state legislatures, pushed by the American Medical Association, began outlawing abortion. And some states adopted and expanded Comstock laws, set by the federal postal service to ban the shipping of contraceptives and informational pamphlets.

At about the same time these laws were passed, the concept of the right to privacy began to emerge.

Ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment failed by just three states in 1982. As a result, women today are not protected equally in a number of areas, including employment, criminal justice, and healthcare. That's the message of a documentary titled Equal Means Equal, screened at the Journey Museum in Rapid City Wednesday night. Democracy in Action sponsored the film to observe Women's History Month. SDPB's Victoria Wicks has this report.

Seventeen Standing Rock Sioux tribal members will receive posthumous Congressional Gold Medals today for their service as code talkers during World War One. The men’s native language was critical in shielding sensitive information from the enemy.

Standing Rock Sioux Veterans Service Officer Manaja Hill says the tribe’s World War One code talkers served to defend their people and ancestral lands.

Unless the legislature says otherwise, owners of flooded land can keep hunters, fishers, and boaters off their property. The South Dakota Supreme Court issued that opinion this week in a Day County case.

Game, Fish & Parks has maintained that members of the public may use the water as long as they get to it by legal means. But landowners say it's up to the legislature to enact a statute, and so far lawmakers have declined to do so.

The Keystone XL pipeline is at issue once again, this time in a South Dakota courtroom. Opponents filed an appeal in 2016 after the Public Utilities Commission gave the go-ahead for the pipeline the previous year. On Wednesday in Pierre, a Sixth Circuit judge heard oral arguments in the case.

Opponents say the PUC didn't do its job to ensure that TransCanada can build a safe pipeline.